


The Spider and The Bee

by Haberdasher



Category: Bumblebee - Fandom, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Identity Reveal, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 18:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17452322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: Gwen Stacy gets a car that turns out to be more than meets the eye.(Yes, this is a Spider-Verse/Bumblebee crossover fic. Yes, this is solely because Hailee Steinfeld plays both roles. So sue me.)





	The Spider and The Bee

Gwen Stacy gets a car for her sixteenth birthday, and she knows that she really should be grateful.

Her parents meant well, she’s sure. And a lot of kids her age would kill to have a car of their own. But to Gwen, the car seems like more trouble than it’s worth. Finding parking for it is generally more of a hassle than just dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the New York City subway system.

(Plus half the time she’s navigating the city, she’s doing it via web-slinging, but her parents don’t know about that part, and if she has any say in it, they never will.)

The car in question isn’t exactly endearing itself to her, either. It’s an old-fashioned Volkswagen Beetle, the kind that she thought had died off decades ago. It looks well-maintained enough, but even Gwen, who is far from an expert on cars, notices that the radio never works and that it sometimes takes multiple tries to start. Her father lets slip at one point that it was obtained in a bust on a chop shop upstate, and honestly, it doesn’t surprise her. An ignoble origin for an ignoble vehicle.

Oh, and the Volkswagen Beetle is yellow. Not a nice, subtle, pastel yellow, either. It’s a bright yellow, a nauseatingly in-your-face yellow, a shade of yellow that reminds her of bumblebees and kindergarten crayons.

Gwen Stacy likes stealth, when she can get it, and this car is anything but stealth.

But she still uses the car from time to time, when where she wants to go is either hard to get to via public transit or off the map entirely. She lies through her teeth about how much she loves the car and appreciates having it.

She even gives it a name, as is their family tradition. She dubs it Bee.

Gwen tells her parents that the name Bee is because the car is the same shade of yellow as some species of bees, and that it’s also short for Beetle, and she’s not lying when she says it, not exactly.

But Bee (or B) can be short for a lot of other things, too. Like Beware. Or Beneath me. Or Below average.

And there’s also how the car always smells like honey, to the point where Gwen honestly wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there was a beehive hidden away somewhere inside the car.

There’s also that, while spiders can kill bees, sometimes the reverse is possible as well. It fits how Gwen always feels herself tensing up when she enters the car, how she’s not entirely sure if she’s joking when she tells friends that that car will be the death of her.

But much as Gwen dislikes the car, she has to admit that it’s handy to have around sometimes.

There’s one night in particular where she just wants to get away from it all, and she drives and drives until asphalt turns to dirt, until New York City is just a twinkle in the distance. Once she’s sure that she’s well and truly in the middle of nowhere, Gwen gets out of the car, sits on the ground, and gazes up at the stars.

(She feels a pang of loss when she remembers how Peter always had the constellations memorized, how he would have pointed out stars in the sky and named them all until the sun had risen over them. But Peter wasn’t here now, never would be again because of her, and without his help she couldn’t so much as find the Big Dipper.)

It’s nice to have a moment to just sit there and relax. She doesn’t have to think about her life back in New York, about all the pressures placed upon her both as Gwen Stacy and as Spider-Woman. She can just take in the beauty of the stars and the soft, cool breeze that makes the trees gently sway in the wind and forget the rest of the world entirely.

That is, until she glances over at her car and finds that it’s not there, and that some sort of robot had taken its place.

...or rather, as she looks closer and notices the robot’s bright yellow color under the pale light of the moon and stars, that her car had somehow turned itself into some sort of robot.

Gwen stands up immediately and blurts out the first words that come to mind.

“Are you my car?”

She sees the transformation this time, sees the metal twist and turn and shift into place as what had been a robot turned itself back into the Volkswagen Beetle that she had grown to know, if not love.

“You- you can change back, it’s alright.”

It-

No, that doesn’t feel right. Gwen had already half thought of Bee as a “he” even before her personification of the car became so, well, literal.

 _He_  changes back into his robotic shape. His form is generally humanoid, with what looked like a face holding big blue eyes that were shining right at her.

Gwen hopes that she was right in thinking that this spot was in the middle of nowhere, hopes that it’s obscure enough that nobody else would see what her car had become.

“Can you understand me?”

Bee makes a strange noise, one that she could swear sounded a bit like a bumblebee’s buzz, and one that she definitely didn’t know how to interpret.

“Nod your head if you can understand me.” Gwen demonstrates, and Bee replies in kind.

Okay, so they have a language in common. That’s good. Just thinking about trying to invent a language that humans and robots could share is enough to give Gwen a bit of a headache.

“Can you talk?”

Bee buzzes at her again. She thinks she knows what that means, but she wants to be sure.

“Shake your head like this if you can’t talk.” Gwen shakes her head, and so does Bee.

That was... less good. It would be a lot easier if they could talk to one another about what was going on rather than just Gwen asking questions and Bee having to gesture out his responses. But then, nothing in Gwen’s life ever seemed to come easy.

“Are there others like you?” she asks.

Bee stays silent and still for a long moment.

“Or do you not know?”

Bee shakes his head without prompting and lets out a soft whirring noise that sounds a bit like a sigh.

Okay. So not only does she not know the big picture here, he doesn’t either. They are both utterly clueless.

They’re  _so_  screwed.

“That’s fine, that’s fine!” Gwen’s voice turns oddly high-pitched as she tries to reassure Bee, the palms of her hands raised and facing towards him. “We can work this out. I’ll help you. We can do this.”

Bee stands up, and Gwen realizes for the first time just how tall he is. He definitely couldn’t fit in her family’s tiny garage like that. And she feels small in comparison, tiny compared to this massive robot facing her, and she has a suspicion that Bee feels the same way.

Gwen’s heart races as she gets an idea of how she can prove to him that she’s not as incapable as she appears. It’s a risk, sure. But he had just revealed what had to be his biggest secret to her, and it felt right to reciprocate the gesture.

She doesn’t have her full Spider-Woman suit with her, hadn’t thought it necessary to bring it all the way out to the middle of nowhere.

(That was probably for the best, really; she probably would have left it in the car, and she suspects that anything in the car has been crushed and mutilated beyond recognition by now, though if all she lost because of her giant robot car was the handful of emergency supplies she left in the trunk and the spare outfit and papers she kept in the glove compartment, that would count as a win in her book.)

But she does have her web-shooters, tucked under her sleeves, just in case.

Gwen shoots one web out onto Bee’s left arm, then another onto his right arm. The webs send her soaring upwards, and she leaps with all her power until she and Bee are face-to-face. She does a flip in the air as she descends, balancing on the tips of her toes for a moment before letting her entire feet hit the ground.

She takes a bow at the end of her little performance, though she highly doubts that Bee would understand the meaning of it.

“Bee, meet spider.”

Gwen isn’t sure of the exact meaning behind Bee’s excited whirring and buzzing, but she assumes it was some kind of positive feedback directed her way.

“We should probably head back in a bit, before my dad starts asking too many questions.” Gwen says. “But first, can I take a picture of you? I have some-”

Gwen laughs quietly to herself, partly because this whole situation is completely and utterly absurd, but partly because she knows just a few short months ago she never would have envisioned herself saying what she was about to say next.

“-some friends who might be able to help us. And I think the first step is letting them get a look at you.”

Bee nods, and Gwen dutifully pulls out her cell phone and snaps a photo of her robot car.

Gwen has a thousand more questions that she feels like asking, but she has a feeling that Bee doesn’t know the answers to most of them either. So instead of trying to get more information out of Bee, she just sighs and says, “Bee, let’s head home.”

Bee turns back into a Volkswagen Beetle, and Gwen steps inside, and she doesn’t feel quite as tense upon entering Bee as she usually did, probably because she knows now why the car had always left her feeling vaguely on edge, and it had nothing to do with it being old-fashioned or bright yellow.

They pass the time on the drive back to New York City in silence, because Gwen doesn’t want to risk people seeing her talk to her car and the radio  _still_  isn’t working. And Gwen begins to get a pit in her stomach as it dawns on her that she now has two huge secrets to keep instead of just one.

Because her life wasn’t complicated enough before, apparently.

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not write more of this, depending on whether I can figure out what comes next.


End file.
